He didn’t respond for a good five minutes, and when he did, he was chuckling and smiling. In response to my quizzical look, he managed to say with a grin, “We assumed this was like a children’s game: choose who you want to be in this new life and, if we pretend hard enough, it will happen.”

“Lucinda and I had a good laugh over that and decided we could join in the fun. I can’t believe we didn’t realize.”

“And now?” I prompted.

“I realize that this is actually a life-and-death situation and we need to bring our A-game every moment of every day,” he said, quietly.

I smiled, “We have plenty of reading and viewing to remind you of Regency Era manners. Making you even minor royalty entitles you to walk anyplace that I do. Titles are like that.”

Well, that statement earned me another quizzical look. It was time to tell about the archive; we’d never had the privacy to discuss it before. Heck, lack of privacy had prevented me from telling him a lot. We’d be sharing an evening cookfire over the next few weeks and I was quite sure we’d have a lot to talk about.

Right now, I simply told him of our vast library. Well, it wasn’t that simple. Although he was computer savvy for the early 1980’s, that wasn’t even close to the world I lived in. I ended up using sci-fi books and movie references to give him the idea. Naturally, that really didn’t come close to the reality of the amount of information I had sitting in storage up in Rulo.

You can’t easily explain advanced storage systems and their near-line capacities to someone from the age of cassette tapes. He knew about fax machines and cable TV, both were high end. Cell phones didn’t exist. How the hell was I to explain petabytes of raw and indexed data to him? He’d just have to see it. I remember Trish being stunned when I showed her my newest storage device at work. She was amazed at how small and fast it was. Yeah, there was a long pause while the data was brought live, but that was a small price to pay for the vast amount of static data. I also explained to him that all of this had a theoretical and usage-based life span, so I was very careful with it. In actuality, you rarely heard the tape library in action. We had so much live storage available that, as an IT Professional, even I was astounded. Storage technology had rocketed along; you could get it all for a song.

Most important, I was able to spend time and talk to a man, not a woman, who understood my culture. Even if we had differences, we seemed to get along. I’d be happy to ride the trail with him any time.

**** ****

Progress was slow. Very, very slow. Neither the riders nor the herd were trail broken, so everyone was confused. I decided to stay out on point as much as possible. They all had to learn, and me, rushing around playing the hero, would just delay these lessons.

So we got a little bit of everything as we rode along,. The list was far too long to recite, but the saddle not being cinched correctly - and falling off - was probably the funniest. The livestock around him, including his mount, all stopped and stared at him like he was an idiot. He suddenly got much more attentive whenever we told him something.

So, yeah, we made ten miles that day. At this pace, we’d make it home before the leaves fell. Yup, ten down and four hundred to go…great decision, Zach. Night camp was another mess. Everyone just wanted to collapse in blankets and I had to cajole them back into action. Half were sent to secure the herd while the other half set up camp and started our fires.

Jeb, Amos, and I were running around correcting mistakes everywhere, from how to start a fire to where to get bread. I explained you had to cook your bread. Most of them looked at me with a blank and confused expression on their face. There'd been too many years of being taken care of, patriarchal helplessness if you will. It was made worse when we discovered that some men had ignored our required supply list and Sheriff himself was one of them.

I decide that St. Charles wasn’t far and they could resolve their issues there. It’s not like they were going to starve. By the same token, Brin ate better than some of them. Most of them dined on dried meat. I’d survived on worse than that, as a modern Marine. Frankly, in this case, I just considered it lessons learned. We’d have a group speak in a day’s time and I’d reiterate those things I’d told them before. One truth of life on the frontier is that relaxing wasn’t part of the deal.

My little group of Amos, Jeb, and Sheriff did pretty well. We set up our lean-tos in a square, around our small fire, and had a decent meal. Yes, it was a rough meal, but it was filling and tasted better than anything I’d ever had out of a can or a MRE. More importantly, my bread starter was active and fresh. Warm bread made everything better. The only thing I wished for was fresh eggs.

Sheriff was putting things together quickly. He watched what we did and figured things out on the fly. He was caught staring into the fire and not cleaning or sharpening his weapons in our lax time that first night. He figured that out pretty soon, also, but needed help with both.

The night…well, that night went on forever. We had to check the watch hourly and I still hadn’t decided what the punishment would be for sleeping on watch. I did know that it would grow harsher as we reached Kansa and Otoe lands. I didn’t relish the idea of someone counting coup on me while I slept.

The word was passed, though. Sleeping on watch was punishable by death. The scary thing was that even the threat of that wouldn’t get through to some people.

Someone would end up being the example.